Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Google Updates Priority Inbox

By Nick Bilton December 7, 2010 3:12 pmDecember 7, 2010 3:12 pm

Google

It’s no secret to the creators of Google’s Gmail service that e-mail isn’t the most practical and concise form of communication mostly because of the constant deluge of messages that can clog up even the most organized inbox. To try and combat this, Google introduced Priority Inbox over the summer, a service that it hoped would organize e-mail messages based on importance.

Although Priority Inbox has offered some respite from cluttered-inbox syndrome, it has not worked perfectly, sometimes becoming confused when organizing messages and sometimes categorizing important e-mails as unimportant.

On Tuesday Google said it had updated the algorithm and features that support Priority Inbox to add some improvements that users had been requesting.

One new feature will offer more information about Gmail’s decision to prioritize each message. This means that a user will be able to see an explanation of why a message was moved up or down the importance ladder. For example, someone might see a note remarking that the message is “Important mainly because of the people in the conversation.”

Google said users complained that “Priority Inbox didn’t learn fast enough,” so the Gmail team has updated the system and “made it much more responsive to your manual corrections.”

Pal Takacsi-Nagy, engineering manager at Google, said in a blog post that Priority Inbox had been successful in that people who used the feature spent “15% less time reading e-mail over all as compared to Gmail users who don’t use Priority Inbox.”

Google will likely continue to try to fiddle with Priority Inbox, especially because Gmail, like other free online e-mail services, faces a new threat from Facebook’s new e-mail system. That service, which began last month, organizes messages based on the people you are friends with online, not in a traditional chronological view.